I was amazed to learn about the importance of intellectual property rights at the 2010 BU MBA Symposium from an executive from Anaqua (among others).
Reported today, Foursquare could be in big trouble because of a patent granted to facebook for location-based check-ins and social media.
Below is the abstract. Do you think it's fair that facebook was granted the patent?
Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members are provided. According to one embodiment, contact content including an associated GPS identifier and status for web-based social network members located at or near the same location automatically appears on a GPS-enabled device. A further exemplary system includes a GPS-enabled device configured to receive a GPS identifier and a status representing a location and a current state for a web-based social network member, a processing module that associates the received GPS-identifier and the received status, and a communications module that sends the associated GPS-identifier and status to a server comprising a web-based social network database. Contact content in a web-based social network database record in the web-based social network database is updated to include the associated GPS identifier and status for the web-based social network member.
Woah, how did Facebook net that patent over Foursquare, Gowalla, and others? Perhaps the major differentiating factor is that Facebook is claiming the existing social network base verses the others. Surely Foursquare will not take this sitting down...
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